BN-LO290_GUNLAW_P_20151203230848

This past Friday the New York Times continued their push for gun control by publishing a further editorial piece. Apparently they saw that their initial editorial produced no change whatsoever and decided that the best thing to do was try the exact same thing again, which is the very definition of insanity. I’m happy they did it though, because they decided to go even further with their inflammatory language and tried to shock their readers into action. In doing so they once again proved that they have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about, and their audience is now dumber for having read their article.

The piece starts out the usual way bemoaning the availability of “military weapons” in the United States. You only have to wait until the second paragraph for it to start to go off the rails, though.

Across recent decades, gun manufacturers, facing a decline in general gun ownership as demographics shifted and sports hunting faded, have cynically created a domestic market for barely altered rifles and pistols developed for the military. These are weapons designed for the rapid spray-shooting of multiple enemy soldiers in wartime, not homeland civilians living in peace.

No, they aren’t. The NY Times believes that “assault weapons” are designed for the kind of “spray and pray” shooting that you see in bad TV movies, but one of their own writers completely disproves that idea. C.J. Chivers in his book The Gun discusses the technical requirements used in the development of the modern firearms used by the military and reveals that the modern M-16 rifle was specifically designed to take precision shots at long range — not “spray and pray” a group of soldiers. In fact, when soldiers began doing that in Vietnam the military reacted by chopping their magazine length to 20 rounds and eventually removing the full auto feature and replacing it with a 3-round burst. The gun was not designed to “spray bullets,” that’s a misuse of the gun by poorly trained conscripts that Hollywood has used in films ever since.

Does the New York Times care to actually fact check their editorials? Apparently not.

Yet the latest casualty count of 14 killed and 21 wounded last week in the gun carnage at San Bernardino, Calif., is another horrendous confirmation of how these easily available weapons — marketed as macho tools for a kind of paramilitary self-defense — are being used again and again for rapid-fire attacks on innocent people. The fact that the California killers were self-proclaimed Islamic warriors makes the ease with which their arsenal was assembled all the more outrageous.

Here’s the catch with this whole article. The Times is demanding that we re-enact the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, a law that they think will remove these scary-looking, evil “assault rifles” from the streets. The problem with their logic is that it’s divorced from reality. California already has a stricter version of that very law in place. The terrorists in San Bernardino complied with the law when they purchased their firearms. The guns they bought were 100% legal and “assault weapons” ban-compliant. They later modified them in their garage to be illegal firearms.

In short, the very location where these attacks took place disproves the Times’ argument that a new “assault weapons ban” would have any impact on these kinds of attacks. But that’s not the only thing they’re going after.

While lurid-looking rifles may cause the most shock in the public aftermath, the industry has also been selling pliant statehouse politicians on the legalization of “concealed carry” handgun licenses. These are spreading powerful semiautomatic pistols with the firepower of rifles through the civilian population, from bar rooms to college campuses, even as evidence mounts that they cause more harm to innocent victims than to fantasized malefactors.

OMG! Concealed carry! People walking around with guns! OMG!

The reality of the situation is that the police cannot be relied upon to protect every single person. They say so themselves, and every time there’s a mass shooting the number one recommendation for how we can reduce the body count is “faster response time.” It logically follows that if the response time can be reduced to zero (if, say, you’re carrying a gun) that would the best solution. The Times doesn’t see it that way, though.

In fact, the Times has been down this road before. They’ve been trying to demonize Americans with concealed carry permits for years. The last time they tried to claim that concealed carry would result in “blood in the streets” they actually accidentally proved that people with concealed carry licenses are far less likely to commit a crime than the standard population. People with a carry permit are one-sixth as likely to kill someone as the general population, one eighth as likely to commit a violent crime, and one seventh as likely to be arrested for drunk driving.

The Times wants us to believe that the prevalence of concealed carry is a bad thing and that the streets will run red with blood if we allow it, but the actual evidence (including evidence that they themselves provided) prove otherwise.

Did I mention that this editorial goes off the rails? Because the author may have well been Casey Jones after the next paragraph.

Assault weapons were banned for 10 years until Congress, in bipartisan obeisance to the gun lobby, let the law lapse in 2004. As a result, gun manufacturers have been allowed to sell all manner of war weaponry to civilians, including the super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle, which an 18-year-old can easily buy in many places even where he or she must be 21 to buy a simpler handgun. Why any civilian would need this weapon, designed to pierce concrete bunkers and armored personnel carriers, is a question that should be put to the gun makers who profit from them and the politicians who shamelessly do their bidding.

The Times has their knickers in a twist about the availability of .50 caliber “sniper rifles” and somehow believe that an “assault weapons ban” would fix this. There’s just one small problem: no version of any “assault weapons ban” would prohibit .50 caliber rifles. Do they even know what’s in the legislation for which they’re cheerleading? I’m pretty sure they haven’t even bothered to read it before declaring that any gun control is good gun control.

Why would prohibiting these guns make any difference anyway? Their article uses the recent “mass shootings” to make their argument that “weapons of war” need to be banned, yet I can’t think of a single “mass killing” in which a .50 caliber firearm was used. That statement comes completely out of left field, apropos of nothing.

Rifles of any kind used in the commission of a crime are extraordinarily rare. Criminals prefer to use small lightweight handguns which are easy to conceal — rifles are the exact opposite of that requirement, and .50 caliber rifles are so far on the other end of the spectrum that they can see Russia from their front porch. The best way to describe a .50 caliber rifle (like this Armalite AR-50 I reviewed a while back) is field artillery. The gun is massively heavy and a huge pain to move anywhere, annoyingly large (so big it doesn’t fit in some cars at all), and amazingly expensive. If the New York Times believes that criminals are spending thousands of dollars on .50 caliber rifles (and $5 a round on ammo) then they are officially off their rocker. One look at a Department of Justice report on the issue should be enough to dissuade any logical person from the idea that these “super destructive” .50 caliber rifles are a problem in any way shape or form.

That’s the problem with the Times’ gun control editorial: the writers are completely divorced form reality. All they know about guns is what they see on TV and in movies and they don’t take the time to actually educate themselves on the true causes of “gun violence” and what solutions would actually make a difference. Instead they are simply operating on pure emotion — they see a scary looking gun and want it banned, no matter what irreparable harm that would do to the ability of American citizens to defend themselves from criminals or what harm it would do to the Constitutional rights of Americans.

The New York Times has made it astoundingly clear that they have no idea what they’re talking about. Anyone who takes more than five minutes to fact check what these guys are saying will be able to understand exactly how full of B.S. this editorial is, and yet because it falls in line with the modern northeast Democrat line of thinking their factually inaccurate statements are allowed to stand. There’s a reason why the Times has refrained from putting a front page editorial in their paper for so long: they were afraid that people would actually read it and realize how amazingly uneducated their authors have become. The good news is that the American people seem to have caught on.

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105 COMMENTS

  1. You can have my gun when the publisher of the New York Times gives up his.

    No, wait. You still can’t.

    • the NY Times once defended its self with a Gatling gun during the draft riots. Would be interesting to see the OLD NY Times staff meet the current NY Times staff. I suspect these days, a mob seeking to burn the place would have much less resistance, just some security guards and locked doors.

      • I know of at least one liberal organization that has finally decided to respond to the death threats they get (yes, death threats from the right hand side of the spectrum) by hiring an unarmed security guard. Since they are a single issue group and it’s an issue I agree on (though occasionally they suffer from leftist tourette’s and comment on other issues), I’ve tried to prod them to at least *bluff* about having guns on site.

  2. The NY Times is just another liberal mouthpiece. But, thanks for posting their writing I needed a good laugh today.

    • It was indeed ludicrous, and also filled with falsehoods/lies.

      “Across recent decades, gun manufacturers, facing a decline in general gun ownership as demographics shifted and sports hunting faded…”

      False. There has never been a decline in gun ownership in the USA; millions more are sold every year, no exception. Even people who give up hunting rarely sell all their guns, and those that do are easily outnumbered by new gun owners.

      “…is another horrendous confirmation of how these easily available weapons…”

      False. These so-called “assault” weapons are no more easily available than any other firearm, and in many states/localities, purchases of same are more heavily restricted.

      “…are spreading powerful semiautomatic pistols with the firepower of rifles…”

      False. No pistol has the firepower of a rifle with a similar action type, by any serious objective definition.

      “Assault weapons were banned for 10 years…”

      False. The 1994 Assault Weapon Ban was nothing more than a manufacturing freeze on weapons with certain features; no previously-owned weapons or magazines were affected in any way, so any potential “problem” with existing guns/mags that was apparent BEFORE the ban, continued DURING the ban. Even so, studies after the ban’s sunset showed no benefits attributable to the AWB — none.

      “The nation needs restoration of a federal assault weapons ban — this time minus the loopholes…”

      There were no “loopholes” in the old AWB; it was carefully negotiated with the view that if it was too restrictive, it would not be able to garner the votes to pass. If it had been any more restrictive, even in removing the automatic sunset clause, it never would have become law at all; and now, having been shown to be useless, it would be even harder to get a similar ban passed today, let alone a more restrictive one.

      • Strictly speaking, the “decline in American gun ownership” looks at the percentage of the population which is gun-owning. That is to say, a family with 30 guns counts as one gun-owning family for rate of gun ownership. There are many legitimate sources suggesting a real decline in gun ownership since it peaked in, I believe, the 70s,? The point in the editorial is still spurious, as you point out that the total number of guns has always been increasing and those sales should be all the industry cares about.

        • The vast majority of those studies that discuss reduced gun ownership that I’ve looked at seemed to rely heavily on telephone polling, during a time (last 50 years) when Americans were less and less likely to trust their government, or a poll-taker working for same. When the politicians are talking gun control, assault weapon bans, magazine capacity limitations (handguns AND rifles), and various purchase restrictions, does anyone really think that the average person reached in a telephone survey would be more, or less likely to claim to be a gun owner?

          I don’t have to do a “study” on this subject; common sense, discussions with my friends and relatives, and gun sales numbers tell us everything we need to know, thanks.

      • It was only last year I finally junked my oldest motherboard, it had ISA slots and EDO RAM.

        The ISA soundcard was gorgeous sounding.

  4. I don’t know man, I think they may be on to something. I can see a gangbanger stuffing a 40 pound rifle down his pants and sticking someone up in a parking lot with it. Seems legit.

  5. I have a major penis complex, so I prefer to carry a super destructive .50 caliber, rapid spray, semi-automatic weapon of war, concealed in my pants. Truly, the epitome of studliness.

  6. Dammit…We’re relevant!!!! Pay attention to us!!! Or else we’ll stamp our feet and publish more Collins and Krugman crap…

    • HOLY CRAP! that is not calling for a semi-auto ban. It is literally calling for the executive branch to ignore the law, ignore the judicial branch (when they try to stop it) and literally collect firearms with use of force using the national guard.

      Ignoring this idiots ideas, and getting right to the point, he actually thinks that this would work…
      And what gets me, is people that write this crap have no idea the type of world they would live in once the Executive actually could do what he is proposing. Like his right to write this dribble would be unaffected.

      • Read the whole article. In the “dangers” section at the end, the author makes it clear that the issue is that, after all of the guns are gone right along with all of the other guarantees listed in the Bill of Rights, Americans will realize they live in a corporate oligarchy and a false left-right paradigm. The article points at that, so what, by then it will be too late to do anything about it.

        • I couldn’t get that far. He was so far off the deep end I had to stop about 2/3rds of the way in… How many of his readers get that? very few I bet.

          But as with any CRIMINAL law. I always ask “Are you willing to put someone in jail, point a gun at someone, KILL someone, to enforce that law?”

          If you cant answer “absolutely” to that question, it shouldn’t be a law and should be a civil matter.

        • You really should read the whole thing.

          He was not really calling for anything; it was written as a diary entry “looking back” from the police state of the future and how it happened.

          Seriously. Read it. He makes some interesting points, no matter what his underlying views on gun control are.

      • Take the poll at the end of that article.

        92 percent say, to the effect of, “You’re stoned, dude…”

    • Read the whole article. In the “dangers” section at the end, the author makes it clear that the issue is that, after all of the guns are gone right along with all of the other guarantees listed in the Bill of Rights, Americans will realize they live in a corporate oligarchy and a false left-right paradigm. The article points at that, so what, by then it will be too late to do anything about it.

    • Haven’t we all had wet dreams back when we were 14-years-old? Well, most of us had different subjects, but they are the ones with chronic falic connection to firearms.

      • When i was younger hell. I saw the new ak-50 yesterday and that gives me a chub.

        Also, their fallic connection to guns is that they dont have a fallis, and shouldnt have a gun. Crazy motherfuckers. I saw someone share a fb post from one.of these gun grabbing psychos, and they said that the government should SHOOT all gun owners. Takes a special kind of stupid.

    • Yeah, that 43north dude at the Daily Kos penned a real gun grabbers wet dream. Think he obsesses about it much? Note the article’s systematic approach and the level of detail. It seems that we’ve been living in his head, rent free, for a very long time now. It’s kind of amusing, in a way, to see how utterly unhinged and misinformed some of the grabbers are. And it’s more than a little dangerous. If a critical mass of these folks were to assemble and get real power it would lead to all manner of unpleasantness.

  8. Don’t give the antis any ideas,the cost of .50 cals and the ammo to feed them make them self regulating, what happens when they use a tobacco cigarette type tax to make all guns and ammo beyond most peoples reach.

    • To steal and misquote a line used in an article published here last week, I believe.

      “I’m sorry, sir, in America we don’t BUY bullets; we HAVE bullets.”

      Buy enough ammo before the tax to effectively protest such a tax.

  9. So a .50 cal bullet would pierce right through concrete? Then this gun is far more dangerous than I realized. Nothing can stop it , shoot it straight down and it might go straight through to the other side of the world!

  10. This comment in the comments sections pretty much sums it up.

    “I am a CT resident, registered Democrat, passionate Bernie Sanders supporter. I voted for CT gov Dan Malloy…twice. I am a union member and I live minutes from Newtown. This is the point where you’d expect me to endorse this editorial opinion but I won’t. This is some of the most uninformed and silly writing I’ve yet read on the subject of gun “control”. When will you folks learn to educate yourselves on an issue before drawing a conclusion. You clearly know nothing about the tool which you seek to ban yet you charge forward with feckless glee. The vernacular, misappropism and general naivete of this piece is nothing short of laughable. It is as if you were tasked to write an opinion on driverless vehicles and you are shouting about the dangers of horseless carriages. I beg you to do your jobs and arm yourselves with information because YOU are doing more harm to the advocation for reasonable firearms safety measures than the NRA could ever hope to acheive. Bush league.”

  11. The 18 year-olds that can buy a rifle in .50 BMG had better have about 6 to 10 *Thousand* dollars to walk out of that store with one…

  12. wait!…..what?

    ” reveals that the modern M-16 rifle was specifically designed to take precision shots at long range — not “spray and pray” a group of soldiers. In fact, when soldiers began doing that in Vietnam the military reacted by chopping their magazine length to 20 rounds and eventually removing the full auto feature and replacing it with a 3-round burst.”

    Actually, the M16 was originally issued with 20 round magazines. The thirty round magazines came later in the war and were always hard to get.

    The three round burst opf the A2 wasn’t introduced until long after the war was over.

    Here’s a tip, if you read something in the main stream media, it is usually wrong

    • Thanks, Bud, I was going to address that, but only from my own perspective, what I experienced. I SAW 30-round mags, but never had one for my XM177-E2. Most were in the hands of ARVN. And 3-round burst was a really stupid idea, destroyed the accuracy of the rifle by screwing up the fire control system, even going into combat I’d prefer straight semi-auto. Showed up around 1980, IIRC.

      • And now we have come full circle with the full auto M4A1. The trigger feels pretty good. I haven’t had a chance to shoot mine full auto and probably never will. I easily sighted mine in and the groups were tight with that new barrel and predictable trigger.

      • 3-round burst showed up with M16A2, and it was USMC’s idea. Ditto the stupid long stock that only makes sense for those perfect shooting stances at the range, and tiny long-range aperture. Here’s a PDF of Army evaluation report that basically craps all over the A2 proposal – read it, it’s amusing, detailed, and explains quite a lot:

        http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a168577.pdf

        One other thing. Originally, M16 was very much designed to “spray bullets”; they just misjudged the effectiveness of that (or mistakenly thought they could compensate for the issues). Read up on Project SALVO.

    • When I took basic in 1980 we fired our M-16s on full auto at only one range session. They taught us to use trigger control and attempt 3-4 shot bursts, never empty the mag. They made it clear (all range masters being Viet Nam vets) that the purpose of trying full auto fire was to show how it was nearly impossible to hit the target you wanted (we were shooting pop-up plastic Soviet Soldiers) unless you got lucky on the first round out of the barrel – meaning that a single aimed shot was as effective or more effective than “rock & Roll”.

      Through the remainder of my 6+ years we only fired full-auto once and that was specifically to use up our left-over training ammo allotment at the end of the year.

      • In 1996 we only fired M-16 on three-round burst with blanks. I only fired full-auto when I trained on the crew-served weapons.

  13. ” super destructive .50-caliber sniper rifle”
    This is interesting to me because the New York Times likes to trot out how other countries are so much safer because of their gun laws. Well, in Canada, an 18-year-old with his regular PAL can buy not only a .50 caliber sniper rifle, but a GM-6 Lynx bullpup semi-automatic sniper rifle. If he or she is feeling particularly adventurous, they can buy a PTRD in 14.5mm, or perhaps something in 20mm. Maybe they want to celebrate our history with a Boys .55 caliber.

    And even so, just like in the USA, we don’t see a rash of crimes committed with them.

    • None of these weapons, whether it is one of the .50 call sniper rifles, or the AR15, AK47 type semiautomatics, are particularly suitable for crime. Rifles of all types are rarely used in crimes, amounting to 300-400 or so homicides every year. Simply put, no matter what they show in the movies it is really quite difficult (though not quite impossible) to conceal these weapons, and criminals look for concealment more than they look for capacity for killing. You do see these weapons used in mass shootings, but there is no evidence that they significantly increase the number of deaths. What you typically see in a mass shooting is a death toll similar in magnitude to the shooting in San Bernardino. Yes, that is still horrible. The ideal would be that things like this never happen, but no amount of gun control can bring that about. California has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, and France, where they’ve had two major mass shootings in the last six months or so, has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. Gun control does nothing, really, to stop mass killings. Even if you somehow magically were to be able to completely deny these people firearms, they could still carry out their mass killings with knives, something that we are seeing more and more often in other nations, and we have seen them in America as well. According to the FBI knives are used about 5 times more frequently than rifles in homicide, though handguns are still the most popular weapon for homicide. There is no evidence, though, that more gun control would do anything significant to change that. A huge percentage of the gun homicide crimes are committed in areas with strict gun control (perhaps even an absolute majority of homicides, despite these places being relatively rare in this country). In short, gun control simply doesn’t deliver on the putative reason for it, namely to reduce crime.

      http://thefederalist.com/2014/11/11/knives-kill-more-people-each-year-than-rifles-time-for-knife-control/

  14. NYT is NOT news.
    It is a propaganda engine. We need to counterstrike with the truth, and reach the folks who are still able to use their brains.

  15. “…the industry has also been selling pliant statehouse politicians on the legalization of “concealed carry” handgun licenses. These are spreading powerful semiautomatic pistols with the firepower of rifles through the civilian population…”

    Obviously, they’re talking about the venerable and terminally destructive .45acp.

    • Even so, hunters that stop hunting very rarely divest themselves of ALL their guns, so they are still gun owners, and cannot be referenced as any sign of a reduction in gun ownership. The few that do sell everything are overwhelmingly replaced by new guns owners (probably by a 10-to-1 margin, in my experience).

      We sell MILLIONS of new guns domestically every year, and that fact can’t be easily explained away by the Times and their anti-gun allies, no matter how much they’d like to do so. Outside of WWII (lend-lease and private donations), I don’t think there has EVER been a reduction in gun ownership in America.

    • That idiot rag is simply a reflection of its uninformed dolt subscribers and readers. It might as well be described as a tabloid; in many instances it operates on the same delusional level, such as about gun politics.

  18. Just one more technical nit to pick:
    “…“concealed carry” handgun licenses are spreading powerful semiautomatic pistols with the firepower of rifles…”
    No, pistol firepower is nothing like that of rifles:
    9mm – 350-475 ft-lb muzzle energy
    .45 ACP – 400-575
    10mm – 500-750
    5.56×45 – 1250-1350
    7.62×51 – 2600-3100
    Yes, an AR-platform pistol in a rifle caliber is loads of fun, but it’s hardly concealable.
    This is not the scourge you’re looking for.

    • I thought firepower was measured in rounds per minute, also a category in which long arms whip side arms.

      • No; firepower is officially measured in units of “Fantasy Word Control.”

        Such as the 7.69×39 fired from an AK being extrey powful (see, it broke cinderblocks!) as claimed by a FL deputy a couple of years ago.

  19. “Apparently they saw that their initial editorial produced no change whatsoever”

    Well, it did gain the NRA a bunch of new members.

    I’m a suburban housewife laughing my ass off here at the metrosexual hyperventilating over my “lurid-looking” rifles and rifle-strength carry gun.

    • The liberal so-called “feminists” lose their minds over a lady who can actually protect herself from a violent assault. Of course, these are the same people who call Christians and/or conservatives misogynists, while wanting to let in “refugees” who practice female genital mutilation and stone female (no problem for the male, mind you) adulterers to death.

  20. Disagree, the NYT knows exactly what it’s talking about. They understand the reading level and intelligence of the average reader these days, and they know printing nonsense makes more sense to most people.

  21. Journalists inform the debate. When they disseminate incorrect information, it causes harm to the formation of public opinion.

    Journalists should be required to pass a written proficiency test and obtain a license before commenting on a particular area of public concern.

    Reasonable restriction, right?

  22. What never ceases to boggle my mind is this…thing where they think the NRA and gun manufacturers are manipulating and hoodwinking us into doing their bidding or forcing us to buy awesome guns and we are just clueless rubes. I really don’t get the misfire in the neurons for this, it absolutely doesn’t help them to oppress us or anything. I just can’t see what the reasoning is how this keeps perpetuating.

    • They have no reference for people who are able to make decisions on their own without being told by their social and intellectual betters what to do. They are merely inferring that this MUST be what happens.

      Convincing them of any different is about as likely as convincing an earthworm of the existence of rocketships. It’s simply beyond their ability to comprehend.

  23. What are they afraid of? Death or property damage? Anyone wanting to commit mass murder would be an idiot to use a .50 cal. Too heavy; too long; and only one model is semi-auto.

    But it’s more than clear by now they don’t care if they’re right, and they might even know they’re wrong, about the facts. It’s all about accomplishing the pre-determined objective of banning guns. Ends/means.

    The great thing is they’ve gotten so mad, they’ve gone off the reservation and de-masked themselves. We’re seeing less and less of “no one wants to take your guns,” and “common-sense regulations”. The increased gun and ammo sales and loss of political capital, despite Bloomberg’s millions on their side, has driven them to drop all pretense, and the people can now see these Orwellian thugs for what they really are.

  24. The New York Times has made it astoundingly clear that they have no idea what they’re talking about.

    They may not know what they are talking about, but they know exactly what they are doing. They love to spread the big Democrat lie. Why are they going “batshit crazy” on guns now? It’s the election, stupid. The Slime is trying to create fear, uncertainty and doubt in an effort to get a cranky old beyotch elected to the nation’s highest office.

  25. Both Chivers and the Times are wrong. The M-16 was procured to replace the M-2 Carbine and Grease Gun used by AF Security Police, rear area troops and special forces. The fact that the M-16 is very accurate is a product of the US emphasis on precision engineering and not because AR platform was supposed to be a long range shooter. Under the influence of the flawed SLA Marshall analysis the US Army was as much in the thrall of spray and pray as the Soviets were. The M-14 was the infantryman’s rifle which is why it made a partial comeback in Afghanistan and Iraq where long ranges and hardened defensive positions were common. The removal of fully automatic fire in later models was a result of post-Vietnam analysis that showed that semiautomatic fire was more effective in almost every tactical situation. The three round burst is about lethality, not volume of fire. We kept the M-16 because of inertial not because it is a great weapon, at least not in its 5.56 version. The M-16 is a varmint rifle barely qualified as a weapon of war. The true history of the AR-15 platform goes a long way in debunking the idea that it is primarily a “weapon of war.”

    • If 5.56 is such a useless varmint round, pray tell, why did Soviets developed 5.45 after looking very closely at M16s they captured in Vietnam?

      • A .17 HMR will kill you too. Does that make it a military round?

        You are the one who said useless, not me. The .223/5.56 is slight modication of the .222 Remington cartridge. That is a varmint round. Look it up. It lacks lethality and penetration.

        The M-16 was never meant be anything more than interim weapon because as you pointed out above the Army wanted a spray and pray weapon as per SLA Marshall. The M-14 couldn’t do that. By the time the Army figured out that Marshall was wrong they stuck with platform anyway despite having a sufficient inventory of M-14s to reverse the mistake

        Why did the Soviets go to the smaller round? The Red Army consisted primarily of poorly trained unmotivated conscripts and their infantry tactics were based on massed assaults using spray and pray. In case you didn’t notice they don’t have a large concept Army anymore and their infantry tactics look like ours. No more spray and pray.

        • >> The Red Army consisted primarily of poorly trained unmotivated conscripts and their infantry tactics were based on massed assaults using spray and pray. In case you didn’t notice they don’t have a large concept Army anymore

          My dad is a retired Soviet Army major who served in Afghanistan, so he had been there basically when AK74 was first issued. Based on his experience, this whole notion that “mass assaults using spray and pray” were considered a valid, much less preferred, tactic, is bullshit. Soldiers are and were taught to use aimed shots to hit the enemy, and bursts for suppression. This even predated AK74, in fact, and was also taught with AKM (no idea about before then, but since SKS was still a thing, I doubt it). It didn’t change with AK74 adoption.

          One indirect piece of testimony to this is the design of AK safety. Many people find it weird that it has full auto in the middle, and semi-auto at the bottom, but the intent is actually very simple – a panicked, adrenaline-rushed soldier will slam the safety lever hard, thereby pushing it all the way through, and will end up in semi-auto where they don’t waste ammo. Full-auto is in the middle precisely so that a finer control of one’s motor skills is necessary to engage it, ensuring that it is done as a conscious decision.

          Based on what I’ve heard from my acquaintances who were conscripted (this was in mid-2000s), nothing in terms what of tactical or marksmanship skills are taught has changed since my dad’s time.

  26. Rifles of any kind used in the commission of a crime are extraordinarily rare. Criminals prefer to use small lightweight handguns which are easy to conceal …

    Criminals actually use their hands and feet more often that rifles and shotguns to murder their victims. (Source: United State Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports.)

  28. Nothing new here. Yeah they seem really dumb but if you yell often enuf’ lots of doofuses agree with you. Powder…dry.

  29. One of the mantras of the gun-control camp they love to use: “if you repeat a lie often enough, it slowly becomes the truth for the weak-minded.”

  30. I was politely trying to correct errors in an interview I’d heard on NPR in the relevant comments section on their website, but it’d get deleted after about 5 minutes. After three times I just gave up. No, facts do not matter to them.

  32. Google “r/K selection theory anonymous conservative” and just start reading. Trust me this will bring our situation into crystal clarity and you will understand why their response to an armed attack is to demand that we disarm ourselves.

    They WANT us to die. They WANT a world where people get picked off randomly because that’s the world they are adapted for. They are rabbits, they see the world as an endless field of grass where their gorging is only interrupted when a hawk swoops down to grab one of them, which doesn’t matter because they replace quickly and easily with any other rabbit that happens to be handy for the job. They WANT us -the wolves- to be subject to the same predation, knowing that we don’t reproduce in the same numbers or as quickly – so losing one of us hurts much worse because we cost a lot more to produce – but if allowed to mature we will DOMINATE.

    • Let’s see…difference. ..oh – what about this: I never heard about guns cutting anyone’s head off for not believing their particular version of religion. Or this one: guns never even try to fly airliners into huge buildings. Or bomb the crowd at marathon.
      I guess it boils down to this – guns are things which can be used to do harm or for protection while muslims are people with free will and belief that islam must prevail as only true way of life. That’s when there will be peace on Earth. See, religion of peace.

      It doesn’t mean that ban of muslims or islam makes any more sense than ban of guns.

  36. Remember, the New York Times has a street price of like $4.50, so while any moron can read it for free, you have to be a complete imbecile to actually subscribed to it.

  37. “Apparently they saw that their initial editorial produced no change whatsoever and decided that the best thing to do was try the exact same thing again, which is the very definition of insanity.”

    When in doubt, do it again – only harder this time!

    “Across recent decades, gun manufacturers, facing a decline in general gun ownership as demographics shifted and sports hunting faded, have cynically created a domestic market for barely altered rifles and pistols developed for the military.”

    Leftists always lie.

    “These are spreading powerful semiautomatic pistols with the firepower of rifles through the civilian population, from bar rooms to college campuses, even as evidence mounts that they cause more harm to innocent victims than to fantasized malefactors.”

    Leftists always project.

    “While lurid-looking rifles may cause the most shock in the public aftermath, the industry has also been selling pliant statehouse politicians on the legalization of ‘concealed carry’ handgun licenses.”

    Note the scare quotes on the repetition. Leftists always double down.

    The NYT is three for three on that. (At least)

    “Why any civilian would need this weapon, designed to pierce concrete bunkers and armored personnel carriers, is a question that should be put to the gun makers who profit from them and the politicians who shamelessly do their bidding.”

    Hey, Leftists gotta lefty.

    All you peons out there quit getting uppity. You’re making the New York Times go into hysterics. Next thing you know, they’ll be wetting their lacies and then they’ll stomp out announcing that they’re “Leaving for-EVAH!” just like any forum Trauma Queen –

    Until they stomp back in two days later with another shrill editorial.

  39. “The New York Times has made it astoundingly clear that they have no idea what they’re talking about.”

    Hey, a US Senator recently asked the Director of the fergodssake FBI how people who purchased guns on the internet got them, and the Director of the everluvin FBI said, “I don’t know, I think they get delivered to their door.”

    http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/11/fbi-director-doesnt-know-what-happens-if-you-buy-a-gun-online-video/

    With this much stupid in America’s autocrat sauce, how should we expect anything better from a bunch of Gotham City sheeptard pencil-chewers?

  40. The original AWB never banned AR-15s and AK-47s. Just ones with at least two “Evil Features.” The level of stupid in this editorial almost reaches the level of a parody.

  41. Yet the latest casualty count of 14 killed and 21 wounded last week in the gun carnage at San Bernardino, Calif., is another horrendous confirmation of how these easily available weapons — marketed as macho tools for a kind of paramilitary self-defense — are being used again and again for rapid-fire attacks on innocent people.

    Quick reality check: the San Bernardino shooters are said to have fired 75 rounds between the two of them in an attack lasting “about five minutes”. That’s 7.5 rounds per minute per shooter. That kind of rate of fire hasn’t impressed anybody since the Civil War.

  42. “even as evidence mounts that they cause more harm to innocent victims than to fantasized malefactors…”

    “fantasized malefactors.”

    They are pretending that bad guys don’t exist, even while using their actions as an impetus to push their agenda. It’s amazing.

  43. Small point for the civvie masses. The editorial describes an assault weapon as something that US forces operate in a “spray and pray” style. The reality is trigger control, where one fires what’s necessary. Maybe the expression ‘One shot, one kill.” comes to mind. So, at that point I stopped reading the editorial. I could have written it, but I’d need electro-shock therapy to dumb-down to the writer’s level.

    The people pushing gun control [in fact, universal confiscation] are near hysteria. They don’t understand, weapons, warriors or anything about what is going on in The Sandbox. Some of that’s our fault for not rubbing their little noses in what reality is. We don’t do that for the same reason we protect the anti-war bitches’ right to free speech. It is part of OUR ethic. That is who we are, what we stand for. There is no need now, and there never has been, to let the public know in visceral detail what “patrol work” is like. They did not take on that job. WE did. They are supposed to pay us and give us what we need to defend them. [A good Commander in Chief would be nice.] In exchange for that, they don’t have to smell the smells, hear the screams or dream the dreams.

    We’re OK with the deal. Just hold up your end.

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